FEP rebalance NEW AND IMPROVED!

[Peter]

At the moment, if you had a q10 WWW, would you trade it for 15 q10 chantarells? I know I would. Even though the total number of FEPs you get from either item is the same, the tiny 1-FEP mushrooms are much more valuable because they are guaranteed to improve a specific stat, rather than spreading out the effect over several different ones. In fact, all single-effect foods are much more useful than the polyeffective sausages of various kinds- despite the fact that most multi-stat foods are high-level and the single-stat foods are entirely low-level!

I propose that the current system be reversed, so that low-level foods such as cooked meat, mushrooms, fish, and baked goods have a wide variety of effects (though only 1-5 FEPs in each affected stat), while high-end food provides up to 100-point bonuses into as few as two stats. Perhaps only one extremely high-end food for each would only provide one stat- but these would have such large FEP values that they would effectively be an instant stat gain anyway.

This has a number of effects. For one, low-level players can't cripple themselves because they only eat one food, but instead would be very generalized, with perhaps some bias to some stat or annother- which is good for a new player. High-level characters would have access to very-high FEP foods in specific areas, allowing them to continue growth, but requiring them to specialize more. And, medium-level foods that improve two related stats, such as str and con, would be more valuable than unrelated stats, like str and per.

Finally some example foods:

Bread: None (come on people, bread's the second most quintessentially bland food short of oatmeal. We need a filling food without FEP penalties)
Fox meat (raw): 1 Agi, 1 Dex, 1 Int, 1 Per, 2 black
Fox meat (cooked): 1 Agi, 1 Dex, 1 Int, 1 Per. (or something. Point is, lots of small bonuses)
Honey Bun: 1 Cha, 1 Agi, 1 Con
Low-level cheese: 2 Psi, 2 Str, 2 Per
Running Rabbit Sausage: 3 Agi, 3 Dex, 3 Int
High-cheese: 20 Psi, 20 Cha,
Troll Brains: 200 Str (for the sake of argument)

There's one other thing: there are only 8 foods that would be in that last category. There would be at least 28 unique foods that combine two stats, and many more that affect three or four stats. This means that the high-level foods can be sensibly rare and unique, while the lower level foods could include eight kinds of omelets or thirty kinds of soup.

I would also propose that this be designed mechanically beforehand, then implemented. That is to say, you would decide that you need a food that is tier-5 and affects Psi, Str, and Agi, and then say it's a mushroom-bacon omelet, rather than coming up with some food and picking some stats for it to affect- otherwise we'll probably end up with eighty low-level con foods, one 1-point agi food, and a bundle of high-level str foods that most aren't strong enough to get...

[PhaedrothSP]

I don't much like the other food suggestions, but as for the troll brains, maybe it should give some kind of int lowering FEP..

[Peter]

I don't much like the other food suggestions, but as for the troll brains, maybe it should give some kind of int lowering FEP..

Well, on the whole, my system would lead to newbs not accidentally spamming int via fish. Is that good enough?

[PhaedrothSP]

Yes that does fix the fish problem, but giving those other low level foods 3 or 4 FEP types doesn't exactly help everything else.
An easy way to fix that fish int problem would be to just implement different kinds of fish, which all raise different stats.

[sabinati]

sounds really good until you get to the examples

[Jackard]

sounds really good until you get to the examples

[Pacho]

Well yeah, that's because those numbers are way too high and this would probably require less food consumption to balance out the increased fep gains.

[Peter]

Look, this new dex food (the mushroom-onion-bread thing) is a perfect example. It's actually worth somewhat less than the raw mushrooms are because it is just as likely to boost Con as anything else.

[danylboone]

Your examples are kind of ridiculously high and do not seem to take quality into account...

If the devs actually consider this - something I doubt - bread should provide some sort of benefit to make it better than apples. If not FEP, then say a WWW amount of hunger.

[Peter]

Your examples are kind of ridiculously high and do not seem to take quality into account...

If the devs actually consider this - something I doubt - bread should provide some sort of benefit to make it better than apples. If not FEP, then say a WWW amount of hunger.

Edited the examples to be more consistent.

As for the quality, the foods would scale the same way they do now. A dish would provide more or less FEP depending on if it was higher or lower than Q10. I don't know at what rate foods currently scale. I suspect that Q20 provides twice the FEP of Q10, an Q5 provides half that.

Like I said, bread is currently more of a annoyance than anything because you can only eat it when you're trying to gain Con. It makes sense for bread to be a bland thing that is filling- if it just didn't have the Con effect I'd bake it every day!